Podcast Season One: Badass Course Builders

Season One of the Badass Courses podcast focuses on independent course creators that have built an audience, designed a course, and launched their courses on their own terms and often on their own platforms.

Joel Hooks
your hostJoel Hooks

19 Episodes

Effectively Using Learner Feedback with Marie Poulin

Effectively Using Learner Feedback with Marie Poulin

Marie Poulin, founder of Notion Mastery, talks about how she successfully started the business and used constant iteration through learner feedback to design the course.

Preparing Learners for the Blank Canvas with Quincy Larson

Preparing Learners for the Blank Canvas with Quincy Larson

Quincy Larson talks about freeCodeCamp's business model, course design, and history

Build a Thriving Business without Custom Software with Ben Tossel

Build a Thriving Business without Custom Software with Ben Tossel

Makerpad not only aims to teach no-code, it was also built with it. Learn more from its founder, Ben Tossel, how no-code can reduce costs and save time when starting an online business.

Integrating Live-Content in to Your Course Design Process with Brennan Dunn

Integrating Live-Content in to Your Course Design Process with Brennan Dunn

Brennan Dunn chats about the importance of getting experience, the benefits of hosting workshops before recording a course, and the reasons he decided to build his own course platform.

Creating an Excellent Learning Environment with Eman Zabi

Creating an Excellent Learning Environment with Eman Zabi

Eman Zabi chats about Terrain's process for producing great courses, building an excellent learning environment, and how the platform was built using no-code

Designing Courses Nonlinearly with Kyle Shevlin

Designing Courses Nonlinearly with Kyle Shevlin

In this episode, Kyle Shevlin discusses his philosophies of teaching and learning, as well as the technical details of building a platform and producing content.

Designing Courses Around Mental Models with Josh Kaufman

Designing Courses Around Mental Models with Josh Kaufman

Josh Kaufman discusses designing courses that based around mental models instead of specific technical skills, and how he'd build a platform to support this style.

Engaging Learners with Practical Challenges with Angie Jones

Engaging Learners with Practical Challenges with Angie Jones

Angie Jones discusses creating good exercises, pulling in real world context into courses, and creating an overall engaging learning environment.

Balancing Platform Development and Content Creation with Jorge Vergara

Balancing Platform Development and Content Creation with Jorge Vergara

Jorge Vergara chats about the various jobs her performs as an independent educator

Creating a Successful Business with Fun Project-Based Courses with Wes Bos

Creating a Successful Business with Fun Project-Based Courses with Wes Bos

Wes Bos chats about his course production process, when he decided to hire employees, dealing with theft, managing aging content, and more!

Starting Your Business as a Service Before Producing Courses with Marissa Goldberg

Starting Your Business as a Service Before Producing Courses with Marissa Goldberg

Marissa Goldberg chats about going with a service-based approach when starting her business, focusing on sustainability, and helping students have the environment they need to succeed.

Using Existing Course Platforms to Deliver More Content with Mark Shust

Using Existing Course Platforms to Deliver More Content with Mark Shust

Mark Shust chats about the advantages of using an existing platform, figuring out what content to produce, and designing courses by reverse engineering projects.

Researching to Teach and Testing Your Ideas with Chris Biscardi

Researching to Teach and Testing Your Ideas with Chris Biscardi

Chris Biscardi chats about using multiple mediums to test content, creating good example projects, course maintenance, thinking about your content as various streams, and how he deals with people finding ways to access his paid content for free.

Engaging Learners with a Chance to Struggle with Josh W. Comeau

Engaging Learners with a Chance to Struggle with Josh W. Comeau

Josh Comeau discusses how he designs highly engaging content, how it took him much longer than expected to build his custom platform, and how the strength of his following helped him launch the CSS for JS successfully.

Learning to Manage a Growing Business with Scott Tolinski

Learning to Manage a Growing Business with Scott Tolinski

Scott Tolinski chats about what it's been like to grow his business and bring on more people, what went into building the Level Up Tutorials platform, the essential features of a good course, and how he designs good project examples.

Transitioning From Teachable to a Custom Platform with Tyler McGinnis

Transitioning From Teachable to a Custom Platform with Tyler McGinnis

Tyler McGinnis chats starting with an existing platform before building something later, compensating employees as a small bootstrapped startup, keeping the core value that they're an education business first and not a software shop, and how they've leaned into their niche and specialized their content.

How UI Foundations Was Built to Teach Quality Design with Kyle Gill

How UI Foundations Was Built to Teach Quality Design with Kyle Gill

Kyle Gill chats about teaching the principles of design, the difficulties with measuring learner success, the criteria a good quality course, and the technology behind UI Foundations.

Facilitating Learning Over Bestowing Knowledge with Matt D. Smith (mds)

Facilitating Learning Over Bestowing Knowledge with Matt D. Smith (mds)

Matt D. Smith (MDS) chats about beta testing Shift Nudge, how launching a course was different than other products, the lessons learned from the errors he made with offering a design feedback service to learners, and how the idea for Shift Nudge went from being a product design course to a visual design course.

Raising The Bar For Online Learning with Greg Róg

Raising The Bar For Online Learning with Greg Róg

Greg Róg chats about how engagement is the key to producing great courses, his learning style that has enabled him to be able to consume and understand nearly 1000 pages of material in only two weeks, how he's designed his platform, and how learning style shifts as you gain more knowledge.